by Jane Jakeman
She stopped her flight across the grass and turned back towards the icehouse, then slowly and cautiously she returned and I heard her fumbling with the lock.
“The key is in the lock, it’s very stiff. Ah, I think I have it now.”
I could see her face now as she struggled with the heavy iron key, looking white, nervous and alarmed. Then she paused and took a lace handkerchief out of a side pocket in the tightly fitted black habit, and held it up to her mouth and coughed and gasped into it. I realised that the odour of the dead men had reached her nostrils: I myself had grown accustomed to it during my imprisonment there, so that I had almost ceased to notice it.
“I am so sorry, Miss Anstruther — this must be dreadful for you.”
She made no reply, but put the handkerchief away, held her head high and turned back to struggle with the key again. I heard her panting for breath, so close was she to me, just separated by the wood: the sound was oddly sexual; we might have been sharing the same pillow and gasping together in excitement.
At last there came the sound of the key scraping round in the lock and the door swung open. I fell out into the blessed, blessed air.
For several minutes I could see nothing; even the fading light of evening splintered and danced in my eyes. Gradually, my vision adjusted to the light. I realised she was supporting me by the elbow, as I swayed to and fro.
“I’ll be all right in a moment. Just need to get my eyes accustomed to the change.”
“What happened?”
Her voice was low and controlled, though I felt her body shaking a little.
“I was locked in — I can only suppose it was an accident. I don’t know who it was — probably some meddler who thought the door should not be left open and decided to turn the key in the lock! Very fortunate indeed for me that you came along, Miss Anstruther.”
She passed the lace handkerchief to me. Automatically, I rubbed it over my face, and I suddenly realised that I must present a grotesque sight. My scarred face was now covered with the filth of a charnel house; my clothes were streaked with dirt from my failed attempts to reach the windows. I looked down at my hands. They were cut and bleeding. My trouser leg was ripped where I had torn it on a jagged edge of marble, and my shirt front was smeared with a green slime. Her little handkerchief was black with dirt and I thrust it into my pocket.
“By your leave, miss, I must attend to its laundry for you. I am afraid I must present a most sorry sight. I believe there is a stream in the wood just yonder — I should like to clean myself up a little, if you would excuse me.”
“I will walk with you — why, you cannot proceed alone, sir, you are near fainting!”
It was true that as I tried to make my way to the blessed, cool water of the stream, I staggered on my injured leg and had to allow her to help me. If I could but have a drink of that clean water and remove some of this muck from my person, I might be able to make my own way back to the house without being propped up by a woman in this humiliating fashion. But I must drink, wash and rest first.
We entered the wood, and my vision was clear now. I could see that her hair, which had come down out of its pins, and fell over my arm as she supported me, was gleaming a satiny reddish-brown in the dappled evening light that filtered through the leaves. I stepped ahead, away from her supporting arm, and led the way to a little clearing that I remembered from my childhood. Yes, the stream was still running, even in this dry summer, though it was reduced to a shallow trickle. But it splashed along between grassy banks, bright green and moist. This stream never ran dry, even in the hottest of summers. There must be an underground source somewhere in the hills behind us. The silvery-grey willow leaves flickered above the water and dragonflies of a brilliant peacock blue flitted over the surface.
I pulled her little handkerchief from my pocket and rubbed my hands with it, and then, kneeling at the side of the stream, I cupped the water in my hands and drank, like a wild man.
She turned suddenly away from me.
“I believe, sir, that your leg is quite badly injured. I can fetch my mare when you have rested a little, and she can carry you back to Malfine.”
“I assure you I could not permit that, madam — I will be quite well enough to walk home.”
She turned and looked at me.
It seemed somehow quite natural that she should kneel down on the grass beside me, and, quite unselfconsciously, she helped me remove my torn and dirty shirt.
I saw her eyes move over my body. I was lean and wiry, my body thin, muscled from the riding and walking at night that were my chief exertions, but across my breast ran the great fresh sabre scar that puckered the flesh and descended from my left shoulder to my navel.
“I fought in Greece,” I said. “For Greek independence, to free Greece from Turkish rule. I was fortunate.”
She said nothing.
I rose, moved back to the stream and splashed water over my chest and arms, and then turned back to her. She got to her feet suddenly, and reached out, touching my left shoulder, and traced the deep scar gently and slowly down the length of my chest with the trailing fingers of her hand. I knelt, still, stirring.
Suddenly she pulled her fingers away as if my skin were on fire, as if it scorched her.
Was it the close contact with death that gave me those imaginings, this carnal lust for life, that had not been awakened since I had been healed of my wounds? There were accounts of the city of Naples during the plague that had beset it, accounts that had described men and women, like things possessed, coupling in the cemeteries, on the graves, in the open tombs of the newly dead, copulating naked as the plague pits brimmed over with bodies: the graveyards full of splayed thighs and buttocks, some mottled with plague spots, some living, some dead, some scarcely alive yet still moving their limbs in a last parody of lust.
But what woman would not be appalled? I was newly emerged from a charnel house, still stinking and filthy. And she? Perhaps I imagined what I saw in her eyes.
Abruptly, I pulled myself away and turned back to the water.
I spoke over my shoulder, as I washed.
“You will ride your mare and I will walk beside you. My horse is at some little distance from here.”
We walked back to the patient mare.
I knelt and locked my hands so that the governess could put her foot into my intertwined fingers and swing herself up on to the mare’s back. She rode astride, like a proper horsewoman, not side-saddle in that mincing, affected way of the daughters of the local gentry. She had black glace kid riding boots, of the very finest quality, and there was a froth of black silk petticoats as her gown swung out. Was she in mourning for the Crawshays? If so, she was dressed far more like a woman of means than a humble governess — as I had noticed before, when I had met her at the farm. There was indeed a mystery about this creature. Should I let her keep it?
We made our way slowly back to Malfine, not speaking. She did not look directly at me again, and I took the mare’s bridle and led her along the paths. I did not turn my head to look at the woman in the saddle and she said nothing at all. If she felt any aesthetic admiration for the architecture of Malfine, she restrained it, and made no comment as the classical facade of the house came into view.
We reached the edge of the wood in silence, and I untethered Zaraband, who thrust her soft nose at me. I opened the gate of the rustic bridge for the horses, mounted Zaraband, and we skirted the lawn side by side on horseback to reach the house.
Once in the hall, I summoned Belos, who looked with horror at my disreputable appearance.
“I’ve had an accident, Belos. Would you show Miss Anstruther into the library and bring some tea?”
I turned to the woman. “Would you like something stronger? Perhaps some cognac?”
Still silence. She shook her head.
“Then a dish of tea, Belos, if you please. I’ll go and clean myself up.”
She put up a hand to smooth her hair, which was escaping, disordered, down
her neck, and I thought that she seemed uncomfortable, confused, and added:
“Madam, I forget my manners — no doubt you would like to refresh yourself and rest. Allow me to show you, Miss Anstruther, the way to Miss Ariadne’s old room.”
“Miss Ariadne?” said the governess, with a questioning inflexion in her voice.
“Yes, my sister. I grant you her name sounds absurd in the depths of the English countryside — quite outlandish, is it not? But you see, my mother gave her the name.”
“And what was your mother called?”
I hesitated for a moment. I had not spoken my mother’s name for many years.
“Eurydice.”
It sounded strangely in my mouth.
“My mother, you see, was Greek. I am what the gypsies call a zingaro — a man of mixed blood.”
She did not babble with questions, as many women might have done at this information, but seemed to accept my exotic heredity quietly and without fuss.
We mounted the great staircase that curved above the hall, with its curling-tongued wrought-iron banister that cast sharp black arabesques of shadow upon the white walls, and her riding habit trailed its black skirt from marble step to marble step.
“My mother’s rooms are shut up, but my sister’s room is, I believe, suitable to receive a lady, though you may find some of the fittings a trifle outmoded. Ariadne has not been back to Malfine for many years.”
I called over my shoulder to Belos, who was standing in the hall watching us ascend the stairs.
“Belos, fetch Miss Anstruther some hot water there. And bring a can of hot water to my dressing room as well, would you?”
I opened the door of Ariadne’s room and Elisabeth went in, murmuring her thanks. I called after her. I think now that I did not want her to vanish from my sight.
“Your account of the events at Crawshay’s will be needed. Perhaps you could describe what you discovered there — if, of course, you feel strong enough when you come downstairs.”
There was an assenting murmur from within the room. I shut the door gently.
Needing a drink, I went downstairs, entered my library and poured a tot of brandy from the tantalus that stood on the table. This was the only room in the house that was kept in order. Around me were the familiar long bookshelves, fronted with gilded grilles, behind which the leather bindings, rich calf with gold-lettered spines, gleamed like long jewels in the sunlight, amber, dark green, carnelian, topaz. They reminded me of my mother’s jewels.
Once, in that country of the past, truth and justice had meant something to me — something I had forgotten and thought buried. But when Elisabeth Anstruther had touched that sabre scar, had traced the line it had carved in my flesh on that distant shore, had she rekindled the dying spark of an almost-expired passion? The dumb animal suffering of that wretched gypsy, and then the cool touch of her hand — what had they revived?
I had almost dozed off, sitting there in the warm library. It was late evening, I realised. The whole episode, the imprisonment in the icehouse, the terrible swoop of lust beside the stream, the silent return, had taken several hours.
Then I started wondering. Why had Elisabeth Anstruther been there, near the icehouse, in the first place? It was out of the way, deserted. An unlikely place for her to stray towards, so far from Crawshay’s. I pulled out the strands of hair I had taken from the body of old Crawshay, the strands that had been caught round one of his buttons.
They were long chestnut hairs: Elisabeth Anstruther’s, beyond a doubt. That part of her story seemed true, then: she had acquired the blood on her gown innocently enough: as she had bent over the old man and tried to find some vestiges of life in him, some strands of hair had become entangled with the button. If she was telling the truth then all pointed to an outsider, perhaps the crippled stranger skulking round the village, as a possible murderer.
I made my way up the sweeping curve of the staircase to my room, the master bedroom at the top of the stairs. Here was my dressing closet, a bath, fitted with mahogany and brass, and a washstand on which a copper can bounded with brass was steaming with hot water, where Belos had set it down according to instructions. I washed, changed my shirt, felt human again.
And yet something still troubled me. There was something I had wanted to ask Elisabeth Anstruther about. There was a weightier problem, but it did not seem related to the murders at the farm; my brain felt as if it were whirling still, after the danger of the morning, and I endeavoured to focus my attention on the immediate question which presented itself.
Yes, that was it. Why had she been at the icehouse? What was she looking for? I had never asked her that simple question.
I opened the door of my room, hesitated, then stepped out and across the landing to my sister’s room — or rather, the room that had been used by my sister until she chose never to return to Malfine, but to stay in London with distant relatives, pillars of respectability who could give her the solid security and the respectable society she would never find in her father’s decaying mansion.
I knocked on the door.
There was no response.
The door was not tight shut and I pushed it open. The Indian muslin curtains fluttered in the breeze.
The room was empty.
CHAPTER 11
I, Ambrose Malfine, am a rational animal, an admirer of the philosopher Voltaire, but, like Voltaire, I know that perfectly rational beings may have difficulties in existing in the real, and utterly unreasonable, world and that illogical impulses are constantly intruding. I am aware, therefore, of my own admixture of concerns in my enquiries into the Crawshay murders, and I readily admit that I include the papers that follow for reasons that go beyond their relevance to the case. They are, most certainly, an important part of the accumulation of evidence, for they form part of a vital testimony. I had heard an account from Marie Crawshay, I had heard the version of the accused gypsy, but I had received no record of Elisabeth Anstruther’s story. It therefore forms an additional portion of the history of the deadly events at the farm, for it is told by one who was part of that household and knew its intimate secrets, one who was an intelligent observer of the passions that were hidden to outsiders — and one who became herself embroiled in the events that followed upon those powerful emotions.
But I will confess that this document stirred within me feelings and desires that sat ill at ease with the reasoned chain of logic that I endeavoured to apply, for I must confess that I experienced emotions of intrigue and attraction towards the writer, sensations that made me cast an eye over the copperplate handwriting with more than usual interest.
I have them still, these foolscap pages of fine linen paper, and, as I touch them, I fancy I feel her hand brushing against mine as it skims across a line, dips the quill in the ink, and again moves back and forth, setting down this narrative in her clear and elegant script.
I am very frightened, though I try not to show it. I have left your house — left your protection. I sense — and I am sending these papers to you, the only human being that I can trust.
You will see that I have set down everything that I learned about the Crawshays during my stay at the farm. I know there have been many rumours about me and I desire to dispel the mysteries: you will find here the truth of my own life story.
You asked for my account of what happened at the farmhouse. Forgive my feelings: I could not so soon face you. after our encounter, and prefer to set it out on paper so that no present feelings may intrude into this record.
I write in secret, having locked myself into my room at Crawshay’s farm, fearing discovery, for ever since I came into this house I have had the uneasy sense of being watched. Tom Granby, the man you stationed here, is downstairs, and I believe him to be an honest man, both from his countenance and from his discourse, but there is something in this farmhouse that is very clever, in a certain way. too clever for the Tom Granbys of this world. I am afraid it will outwit him.
Here it is then, my
story, the history told by an insider, the tale that ends in murder. In a sense, it is a secret family history, not the official record that is usually committed to paper, for it is women’s history: things that passed between Marie and myself as we talked or worked within the house, things that women confide in each other; with the understanding that they are not for the ears of the menfolk.
Perhaps I am breaking faith in a way. though I have sworn no oath to keep these things private. Nevertheless, the crimes committed here were so frightful that I feel I am justified in breaking confidences and betraying them to you. And also. I must own. I sense that you understand the conversation of women, know what is important to us and what affects us. I think you have a sympathy for our sex which is not usual amongst English gentlemen — perhaps it is because of your Greek ancestry.
I shall get this sent over by Mattie, who cannot read. Keep or destroy it, Lord Ambrose, as you wish.
The Crawshays had once been a prosperous family, or so I understand, and I must begin with something of their story, which has become so enmeshed with mine. They were not gentry, but they were “well set up,” as people say in these parts of those who have a comfortable sufficiency, of solid burghers or respectable farmers who own their land.
But old Crawshay’s rule ruined the family. His workmen left the farm, because they would not take the lash of his tongue when he was sober, nor the blows of his fists when he was drunk. Tenants were reluctant to bring in their rents, and be abused for their pains. Fields were neglected, sheds, stores and cottages became dilapidated, nettles grew in the fields and the cattle looked lean.
Marie, whom you have met, my lord, was the daughter of an alehouse keeper in the next village. Her father’s business had some pretensions to being an inn, but it had nevertheless accustomed her to hard work and rough behaviour, which was good preparation for life at Crawshay’s.
The match with Edmund should have been a step up for her. After I, Elisabeth Anstruther, came to Crawshay’s as governess to Marie’s son, I heard many stories from Marie of the days before her marriage, of the beaux she might have married, of the days when young men rode from miles around to the alehouse to court the landlord’s pretty daughter. She must have been a beauty as a young girl, and the evidence for that is still in her face, in spite of all that has since happened to her.
